ASA AS A BUILDER

Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the LORD his God.

2 Chronicles 14:2

Asa was a good king.

He led from the front, including in battle (2 Chronicles 14:10).

He was a godly spiritual, and not only a political or military, commander: “He commanded Judah to seek the LORD, the God of their fathers, and to obey his laws and commands” (2 Chronicles 14:4).

He was a demolition expert: “He removed…smashed…cut down” the “foreign altars…sacred stones…Asherah poles” (2 Chronicles 14:3); he understood, as per Jeremiah 1:10, that there must often be destructive work before there can be constructive work, there is indeed “a time to tear down” (Ecclesiastes 3:3). The message has always been “repent and believe” – not just “add this to your collection of beliefs.” All that stands opposed to Christ in our hearts must be torn down, crucified, forsaken. The Lord is a jealous God.

But Asa was also a builder.

Long, hard, constructive work he did not despise.

Indeed, Asa understood better than most when it was “a time to build”.

A TIME TO BUILD

Asa’s reign kicked off with ten years of peace (2 Chronicles 14:1) – a blessing not to be taken for granted in those days.

Now you and I might have thanked God for this peace and then settled into a comfortable peacetime mentality – “Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?” (2 Kings 20:19) – but this Asa did not do.

He took the opportunity, foreseeing the need, to build. “He built up the fortified cities of Judah, since the land was at peace” (2 Chronicles 14:6). Whilst the sun shone, he made hay.

This restful window of time was clearly given by the Lord, and Asa made the most of it.

I believe we are in such a window of time.

There is a time-limited opportunity, and a need, for building.

Why did Asa build “walls…towers…gates…bars…” (v. 7)?

Because he saw both the opportunity – “the land is still ours…he has given us rest on every side” – and the need.

The need was not a present but a future one: Asa clearly saw, whether by supernatural insight or just by common sense, that though they enjoyed peace at that time, war would one day come.

For this reason he also maintained a standing army: five hundred and eighty thousand “brave fighting men”, fully equipped (v. 8). Again, the commitment and cost to do all this in time of peace – and to do it properly – shows what a wise and effective king Asa was.

By the time we come to the next verse, we see how necessary it had all been: “Zerah the Cushite marched out against them with an army of a thousand thousands…” (v. 9)

CONSTRUCTION WORK DELAYED

We, like Asa in the early part of this chapter, are currently in a (narrowing) window of opportunity, where there is an urgent need to build, but many of the necessary works are yet to start in earnest.

I believe that we underestimate both the opportunity and the need and that in part is why we are still not doing many of things we can and should be doing.

On the one hand we bemoan our present lot, and plead powerlessness.

“The culture’s gone!”

“What can one do?”

“Christians are a persecuted minority, no-one will listen to us!”

Now I would be the first to admit that the country is going in a very bad direction indeed. No doubt we are in the early stages of judgment.

But, as one of our own poets has said, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

By refusing to acknowledge the incredibly privileged position we do still enjoy at present, many of us excuse ourselves from the good work that must and still can be done.

“The land is still ours…” (v. 7).

But then on the other hand, at the very same time as overestimating how bad things are now, we underestimate how bad things are going to get – and therefore our need to prepare.

KILLING ME SOFTLY

The creeping soft totalitarianism of many decades – political correctness – is just beginning to turn hard. There have been more than 60,000 arrests over a five-year period for “wrongthink” statements on social media. You can now be arrested for praying silently in your head within 150m of an abortion clinic.

But so much of the Church still seems to be asleep at the wheel, oblivious to the peril we are hurtling towards.

The reason for this is, in part, that soft totalitarianism has succeeded in softening us up.

Jackie Pullinger says that we need to have soft hearts and hard feet, but many of us have hard hearts and soft feet!

Long before buffer zones were erected by law around abortion clinics, unofficial buffer zones were erected by us Christians in our own hearts, in our conversation, in our pulpits. Abortion has been and still is, for so many, a no-go area. We have long been lured into preferring our own comfort over justice and safety for the voiceless unborn, and we have believed the lie that to upset or offend (adults) is a wrong that trumps all wrongs.

THE BUFFER ZONES IN OUR HEARTS

And so, long before buffer zones were written into our statute books in black ink, they were written into our hearts with that invisible ink of political correctness. We are inured to the outrageousness of buffer zones because we half-support them. “It probably is wrong,” we say to ourselves, “to interfere with a vulnerable woman at the point of making a difficult and deeply personal choice.”

I spoke with an elder of one of the most conservative evangelical churches in a certain university city who told me that it would be wrong to make abortion illegal until we (i.e. the Government) have expanded social care.

We have been well and truly groomed into embracing this hard totalitarianism that is just beginning to take hold: its softer cousin has done such a great job. We have become soft soldiers of Christ – every tyrant’s dream. How ill-prepared we are to stand against what’s coming!

“Comfort is the new gulag,” says Rod Dreher, reflecting on the creeping progress of soft totalitarianism in the West. I wonder whether it is our obsession with (idolatry of?) comfort that makes us simultaneously greedy and discontent with our still-very-privileged lot, and unwilling to face where things are really going because that would require of us a costly and painful stand – in a word, I fear we are not much use for the times we are moving into.

It is beyond the scope of this little blog, but the threat of Islam on the one flank joining forces with secular humanism (Marxism) on the other to squeeze Christianity in the middle is something that most British Christians are still completely unaware of or in denial about – and those seeking to raise the alarm are generally despised and vilified.

NARROWING WINDOW

But an honest survey of the situation tells us that for now, we still really can do so much. We do still have this window of opportunity. Yes, there are buffer zones around the abortion clinics but do we not still have complete legal freedom to preach in our pulpits? And yet most pulpits are still silent on the baby genocide. And are there not thousands of miles squared of public property where we can still educate and speak about abortion freely, changing hearts and minds, offering help, saving lives? Why are we not using the vast tracts of space to do the work we can’t do in just a few small pockets?

And yet an honest survey of the situation also warns us that we may not have much time left to do certain kinds of work. The window of opportunity is narrowing. We must do these works whilst it is still day (John 9:4), and prepare for the new kinds of works we may be limited to when it is night. The abortion industry is hardly going to retire now that they have got us 150m away from their baby-killing centres. And has Islam ever been known to willingly retreat?

NOW IS THE TIME

This is most certainly a time to build.

A time to build impactful, pro-active, life-saving ministries.

A time to build ministries that are not measured first and foremost in organisations, programmes, bricks-and-mortar, but in real discipleship and transformation: the ordinary people of God doing the good works ordained for them, equipped by the Holy Spirit, at a grassroots level.

A time to build ministries that will be resilient to the era we are moving into, “invisible” as it were to the enemy, not vulnerable to being switched off by the powers that be by merit of being overly institutionalised or dependent on anything other than the word, the Spirit, and one another locally.

A time to make the most of every opportunity we have whilst we still have it.

Watch this space, and we will, God willing, be introducing you very soon to a new initiative that we are really excited about: building gospel-centred, life-saving, pregnancy support ministries in and through local churches just like yours.

"I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it."

Jesus Christ

This is the first of three reflections on 2 Chronicles 14 and 15.

Click here for the second.

Click here for the third.